Crowbar started as a Dell OpenStack installer project and then grew beyond that in scope. Now it can be extended to work with other vendors’ kits and other solutions bits.

We are contributing Crowbar to the community because we believe that everyone benefits by sharing in the operational practices that Crowbar embodies. These are rooted in Opscsode Chef (which Crowbar tightly integrates with) and the cloud & hyper-scale proven DevOps practices that are reflected in our deployment model.

Non-open source license components (BIOS+RAID config) that we could not distribute under the Apache 2 license. We are working to address this and include them in our release. They are available in the Dell Licensed version of Crowbar.

Hi Rob, firstly thanks for this – very cool. I had just finished building my own bootstrap system and was looking to deploy the Stackops distro, but will give this a try first.

Just a question, the deployment guide mentions a VM image “A VM image with an initial TFTP/DHCP/boot-server is provided.”, is this available publicly, or is it excluded as per this note in your exclusion list “Pre-built ISOs with install images”

Just re-read the deployment guide and I see the VM is actually booted off an iso, which will then be one of the iso’s you mentioned. Are you producing any build it yourself documentation that doesn’t require the use of the Dell packaged ISO’s?